Unreliable Narrator
by Assimbya
Summary: For Miriam, survival will always be a complicated proposition.


They hospitalize Miriam, after she shoots Dr. Chilton. It is easy enough to have her admitted ("danger to self or others" is the criterion, and she certainly meets that, doesn't she?), and she doesn't argue. She feels dizzy. Her hand keeps shaking, as it did not when she held the gun (she felt so steady then, so clear, so determined). She does not want to think about the spatter of blood across the wall, the man's body going limp. She thinks he is dead, but no one tells her and she does not ask. What she wants least of all is to be asked more questions about what happened, what she remembers, how she knew this man for her captor.

She does not want to remember the echo of a voice beyond Chilton's own, smooth and solicitous: _I could let you live._ It feels as though there is a patina of guilt over her skin, and she cannot rub it off. She knows that she is alive, and the Ripper's other victims dead. Her life, and her freedom, were not an accident. Could the bullet through Chilton's skull have been one?

Miriam will not tell the FBI that she doubts herself, not then. She saw the look on Jack Crawford's face and knew that he already thought her corrupted, unreliable. He would distrust anything she said. She sits in the hospital ward in her soft clothes, tries to smile at the nurses who lay a hand on her shoulder, even when she wants to flinch. No one there quite knows what to do with her. She isn't what they're used to treating.

The doctors and social workers seem cautious with her, wary of asking too many questions beyond the present: how does she feel, what is she eating, is she worried about seeing her parents again? She looks them in the eye when she answers, remembering the FBI trainee she once was, who wore confidence like armor, who spoke directly and simply, coming down hard at the ends of her sentences. She thinks they are impressed by her discipline, even if her voice, like her hand, shakes sometimes now. They send her to an occupational therapist, to learn how to do household tasks one-handed. She likes that part. The therapist makes her laugh.

At some point, Alana Bloom is called in. "She's a trauma specialist," the social worker said, "she'll be able to give you better care than any of us here." Miriam recognizes her immediately as the woman who sat in the identification room with Doctor Lecter, who spoke with an edge of ill-concealed impatience. She does not sound like that now, her ID pinned askew to her red blouse. Miriam looks at Doctor Bloom's soft, curling hair, and thinks that, if she had the confidence she knew before her captivity, this is the kind of woman she could desire. But now she is broken and unpredictable, and Doctor Bloom is meant to be her therapist.

Miriam watches her sit down, carefully, with her back to the door but not blocking it, as though it is automatic to her now to offer her clients an exit. Trauma specialist indeed.

"Doctor Bloom," Miriam says, "I appreciate you coming all the way here. Ma'am."

"You can call me Alana," Doctor Bloom answers, "and it's my job. I'm glad to be here."

Miriam wonders if there was competition over who would get her case, whether she is as rare a commodity among psychotherapists as cases of exotically artistic murder were in the FBI. Or whether no one wanted her and the liability that she brought with her.

"They said that you help people with trauma; I don't know if I'm traumatized." The words echoed strangely in the room, and Miriam qualified them, hurriedly. "What happened changed me, obviously. I haven't been acting like myself. But - I don't know if you've read my statement - the Ripper, he...he didn't touch me. I was out most of the time. It could have been one hell of a lot of worse."

Alana's mouth quirked up, an echo of a smile. "I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say that in my office. But a lot of people would say that it can't get much worse than being held captive by the Chesapeake Ripper."

Miriam touched her stump, and felt bitterness on her tongue. "I'm lucky. I'm alive."

(How many others did he kill while she slept in a drug-filled haze? Her parents might rejoice at having her back, but how many others were still grieving for the humiliation of their children laid out in one of the Ripper's grotesque installations, body parts dissembled for his amusement?)

Alana spoke quickly, almost eagerly. "You are. And that shows a lot of resilience, Miriam. You've survived this far."

She does not let her fury show. How little pretty, composed Alana would think of her if she knew the bargain she made for her survival. _I am going to give you a choice, Miriam._ Remember Chilton's blood spattered on the back wall. Her victim. The impulse that had consumed her as she reached for the gun, as if from some part of her self she could not identify. She was not herself any longer.

"I was wrong, wasn't I?" she asks, unable to keep from mentioning it, from having no answers, "I shot the wrong man, in the identification."

Alana's face is still and shuttered suddenly, as though she was trying to keep her composure. "We don't know that yet." A beat. "No one blames you, at the FBI; whether you were right or not, your reaction was understandable. You felt a need to protect yourself, and you acted on it. That shows that you still want to survive, that all this hasn't made you give up. As your therapist - if you're okay with me calling myself, if you think you want to work with me - I see that as a good thing."

For a moment, Miriam lets the words rest in the room, echo. "I can't remember most of it. How can I heal from something I can't remember?"

"A lot of people have traumas that they can't remember all of - maybe things started when they were too young, maybe they drugged, maybe they blocked some of it out. Sometimes your mind is trying to protect itself from the memories, and we don't have to push that. We can work together on rebuilding your future, not just on processing your past. And we can grieve all the things that you've lost, even if you don't remember how all those losses exactly happened.

 _Yes,_ Miriam thinks, _three years of my life, my memory, my self-respect, my arm._

Miriam reaches out to shake Alana's hand. "I'd be grateful to work with you, Ma'am," she says, but she knows as she says it that she will never be able to tell Alana all of the truth.

Jack Crawford comes during visiting hours, but he refuses to talk about the case. When she asks, he rests his warm hand on her shoulder and changes topics.

"I've brought a friend of mine to see you," Alana says, "a psychiatrist. Remember how we were talking about the problems you're having with your short-term memory? I thought he might be able to do an evaluation, if you'd be okay with it."

Cold spreads through Miriam's chest. "We've met." When Doctor Lecter does not respond to that, she elaborates. "Jack Crawford took me to see him, to see if we could recover my memories." She doesn't mention the one-way mirror, the line-up. They both remember that, or they should. Surely it is not so common an occurrence, for a psychiatrist to be under suspicion of kidnapping and murder?

But Alana looks surprised. "Recovering memories is a very tricky and delicate proposition; I'm surprised that Jack would try to encourage it so early."

"Friend Jack has been in desperate straits of late." Lecter speaks casually, but his eyes are upon Miriam. Everything goes out of her mind, all thought, all fear. She feels still and empty.

As Alana remains in the room, he asks her questions about her memory, has her hold a list of numbers in her mind and repeat it back to him a few minutes later, asks her to name objects around her. When he comes close to say goodbye, he says softly, almost in her ear, "Miriam. I am so proud of you."

Like a stone dropping in water, she knows.

No one seeks her out, after the massacre in Doctor Lecter's house, not even the tabloids.

It is more than two years later when she goes to Doctor Du Maurier's lecture. She has kept quiet for that time, distant from the chaos of the FBI and Hannibal Lecter's capture - working at an animal shelter, attending graduate school. At one point, Freddie Lounds remembers her existence and urges her to co-write an autobiography, but Miriam evades her. She does not go back to therapy.

She testifies in the trial, but she can tell that it is not her testimony in which the jury is most interested.

Bedelia Du Maurier is beautiful, but in a way that Miriam finds frightening rather than enthralling. The edges of her words are so sharp that Miriam thinks she could cut herself on them. After the lecture is over, she waits in her seat as Du Maurier gathers up her notes and sends off sympathetic audience members.

It is only when the room is empty that she speaks, her voice ringing like an actor's. "Miriam Lass. Are you going to talk to me, or would you just like to stare?"

Miriam stands, walks to the front of the room. She lets Du Maurier rest her eyes upon the empty sleeve of her coat (she cannot stand prosthetics). "I did't want to intrude," she says.

"How polite you are." Miriam can hear, without Du Maurier needing to finish the sentence, what would come after: _that must be why he didn't kill you._ "It's not intrusion. I'm sorry we've never had the chance to meet before this."

"I am too." Miriam breathes. "You spoke so well. I could never describe it like that."

Du Maurier tilts her head a mere fraction of an inch. "And what I described - was it what you experienced? Are we alike, in this?"

Miriam hears Du Maurier's voice shake, and remembers how Lecter watched her during the trial with indulgence and - would she term it that? - pride. "We're both alive. We're alike in that."

The other woman smiles. "We are. Survival can be a very ugly thing."

It is an ambiguous statement, and Miriam can tell that it is meant as such, meant to be safe in whichever way Miriam takes it. Miriam remembers, as she has so many times, the explosion of Chilton's skull, and she takes it the dangerous way.

"No one can survive without making compromises."

Du Maurier inhales, slowly, and lowers herself into her chair. "I always thought you would despise me, if we were ever to have this conversation. It is your purported narrative I have capitalized on, after all. But instead I find that there is more to you than I could ever have imagined."

Miriam does not sit. "I don't know what he asked from you. But I do know that I would be dead if I hadn't been willing to get my hands dirty."

Du Maurier reaches into her purse, and for a moment Miriam expects a gun, but she is only taking out a business card. "Call me if you ever need a psychiatrist, Ms. Lass."

Miriam takes the card. "I don't much like psychiatrists. But I could do with a support group."


End file.
